Krauss and her band, which features Jerry Douglas, Ron Block, Barry Bales and Dan Tyminski, will kick off the tour on June 4 at The Louisville Palace Theatre in Kentucky. They'll also stop at Knoxville's Tennessee Theatre on September 24 and 25.

Paper Airplane is Krauss & Co.'s first full-length studio album in seven years, and it made its debut at No. 3 on Billboard's all-genre Top 200 album chart.

Alison Krauss doesn’t write songs, and she tends not to sing them so much as inhabit them.

But as she and her band, Union Station, worked to complete their first studio album since 2004, Krauss was finding nowhere musical to live. They began recording in September 2009, and by early 2010, they’d crept to a creative standstill. Krauss felt something along the lines of the chorus to “Lie Awake,” one of the handful of songs she and Union Station had completed:

“How do I lie awake now, when I know I’ve got to be moving on?” goes the song — penned by her brother Viktor Krauss and singer-songwriter Angel Snow — which appears on the finally completed, newly released Paper Airplane. “How do I lie awake now, when nothing’s right and nothing’s wrong?”

“Everything seemed pretty gray,” Krauss says on a sunny spring day, far removed from the winter of her disconnect, when migraine headaches further hampered the proceedings. “It was very strange, like you had no gut reaction. I couldn’t tell what was good and what was not.”Continue reading →

Paper Airplanes includes covers of Richard Thompson's haunting "Dimming Of The Day" and of Peter Rowan's "Dustbowl Children." Union Station includes Dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas, bass man Barry Bales, multi-instrumentalist Ron Block and guitarist/vocalist Dan Tyminski.
Country Music Hall of FamerEmmylou Harris' Hard Bargain will come out April 26 on Nonesuch Records. The 11-song album includes 11 songs penned by Harris along with one from producer Jay Joyrce and the Ron Sexsmith-written title track.

Two of Hard Bargain's songs deal with fallen friends: "Darlin' Kate" is a remembrance of collaborator Kate McGarricle, who died in 2010 of cancer, while album opening song "The Road" is a rumination on Harris' time with country-rock forerunner Gram Parsons.

Mandolin prodigy Sierra Hull will celebrate the release of new album Daybreak with a Belcourt Theatre concert on Tuesday, March 22.

Hull, 19, is in her final year at Berklee College of Music, where she is the first bluegrass musician to win a Berklee Presidential Scholarship. She wrote seven of the 12 songs on Daybreak, which was produced by Barry Bales of Alison Krauss' Union Station band.

Hull's Belcourt show begins at 8 p.m. The Belcourt is located at 2102 Belcourt Ave. in Nashville. Tickets are $20 in advance or $22.50 on the day of the show, available at www.belcourt.org or by calling 615-383-9140.

The two acts -- who were both up for album of the year at Sunday's Grammy awards -- are part of a star-studded, characteristically broad lineup that includes Nashville rock duo the Black Keys, reunited '60s supergroup Buffalo Springfield (in an an exclusive festival appearance), hip-hop hit maker Lil Wayne, back-in-action modern rockers the Strokes and country legend Loretta Lynn.

Ashley Capps, president of Bonnaroo co-producer AC Entertainment, says the roster was assembled with Bonnaroo’s same tried-and-true principle: "Put together a mind-blowing lineup."

“But certainly with this being the 10th year, we were looking to do two things: keep the festival fresh, exciting, edgy and contemporary, but also celebrate the Bonnaroo tradition that’s emerged over the last decade, and acknowledge a lot of the history of the festival.”

Paper Airplane is Krauss’ 14th album. Since her debut in 1985, she has sold more than 12 million albums and won 26 Grammy Awards, the most for any female artist of any genre. The new album is Krauss and Union Station’s first since 2004’s Lonely Runs Both Ways, and it is Krauss’ first since her Grammy-winning collaboration with Robert Plant, Raising Sand. The new, 11-song album includes the Richard Thompson-penned “Dimming of the Day” and the Peter Rowan composition “Dust Bowl Children.”

Union Station features multi-instrumentalists Dan Tyminski and Ron Block, bass player Barry Bales and Dobro great Jerry Douglas. Krauss and Union Station produced Paper Airplane, which was recorded in Nashville with engineer Mike Shipley.

The Grascals have just released 'The Grascals & Friends: Country Classics With a Bluegrass Spin' through Cracker Barrel. Click their image to see some other key Cracker Barrel music releases.

Traditional bluegrass isn’t often recorded with electric instruments, and most country music doesn’t feature mandolin and banjo solos, but Terry Eldredge and the rest of The Grascals would rather pick and sing than parse definitions. The band has spent the past six years ignoring genre lines already blurred by decades of country/bluegrass interminglings from forerunners including Earl Scruggs and The Osborne Brothers.

Singing bluegrass in country settings, or performing country songs bluegrass-style, comes easily to Eldredge.

“My heroes are George Jones and (bluegrass legend) Bobby Osborne, and I’m totally influenced by both of them,” he says. “I have a lot of country in me, but my roots are in ‘grass.’ ”

Grascals member Jamie Johnson (not to be confused with country artist Jamey Johnson), says the key to melding the two sounds is attitude.

“You just get up there, smile and kick ’em right in the (posterior),” he says. “Dolly Parton told us if you open your heart to the people and have fun, they’ll open their hearts to you, and they’ll want you back.”

Formed in 2004 and the winner of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s top entertainer award in 2006 and 2007, The Grascals have already booked more concert dates for 2011 than the band played in 2010. The Cracker Barrel deal is one reason for that, as the store’s approach of releasing one exclusive bluegrass release per year offers something like pole position for sales and acclaim.

What Starbucks did for Norah Jones, Cracker Barrel is offering on a homier level for bluegrassers: In 2010, duo Dailey & Vincent won the IBMA’s album of the year prize and debuted at No. 19 on Billboard’s Country Albums Chart with another Cracker Barrel bluegrass/country collision, Dailey & Vincent Sing the Statler Brothers. Before that, Alison Krauss & Union Station’s Cracker Barrel exclusive, Home on the Highways, was also a hit.

“When you see people like Zac Brown and Smokey Robinson getting in line to do Cracker Barrel albums, that’s a no-brainer,” Johnson says. “Somebody’s paying attention over there. They’re not just eating chicken and dumplings, they’re buying music.”

A little help from friends

The Grascals had been interested in teaming with Cracker Barrel for years, and the end of their four-album deal with Rounder Records enabled the pairing. The band had recorded in the past with Bentley, George Jones, Hank Williams Jr., Vince Gill, Steve Wariner and other country-identified artists, and an album of collaborations seemed like a natural.

For the new disc, the group decided to augment its core mix — Eldredge and Johnson’s acoustic guitar and vocals, Terry Smith’s bass and harmonies, Danny Roberts’ vocals and mandolin, Jeremy Abshire’s fiddle and Kristin Scott Benson’s banjo and guitar — with drums, piano, electric guitar, accordion and steel guitar, all of which are more commonly associated with country than with bluegrass. They recorded basic tracks and left spaces for their all-star guests to fill in.

The Nitty Gritty Dirty Band hit “Mr. Bojangles” is recast with Joe Nichols’ buttery baritone (“The best male voice in country music since Keith Whitley,” Johnson said) forwarding the story, while Dolly Parton’s “The Pain of Loving You” offers an unusual (and pleasing) banjo/steel guitar interplay and a peppier tempo than the original.

“There’s pressure each time you do something like this,” Eldredge says. “We recorded Dolly’s ‘The Pain of Loving You’ and wondered how she’d like it.” He was well-familiar with Parton, an early supporter of the band who brought The Grascals out with her on tour in 2004. But familiarity doesn’t always breed confidence, particularly around legendary types. “One of the first things she said that day was, ‘I love this track,’ ” Eldredge adds. “That was a good thing. Then the sweat beads stopped, at least until I had to go in and sing with her.”

The Grascals wanted to be sure that she and other guests enjoyed the music. They did, and no one in the studio complained that the steel guitar-filled “I Am Strong” didn’t fit the traditional bluegrass model established by Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys in the 1940s, or that the swinging “Tiger by the Tail” featuring Brad Paisley didn’t follow the raw and edgy Bakersfield Sound model that marked Buck Owens’ original. Johnson says country audiences don’t mind the cross-pollination, either, even when the band brings fiddles and banjos to otherwise amped-up, multi-act festivals.

“We never get anything negative back from the fans. They love it,” Johnson says. “We don’t take a back seat to nobody, man. We’re as good as a lot of the country bands dreamed of being, we just don’t have the amplifiers to cover up our mistakes.”

Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.

IF YOU GO

What: 37th Annual SPBGMA Bluegrass Awards Show & 28th National Convention; the Grascals take part in Sunday's Awards ShowWhen: Feb. 3-6; awards show starts at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 6Where: Sheraton Music City Hotel (777 McGavock Pike, Nashville)Tickets: Weekend tickets in advance: reserve passes are $85 ($40 children 6-12), general admission $65 ($30 children 6-12); weekend general admission tickets are $75 at the door ($35 children 6-12). Sunday-only tickets are $40 ($20 children 6-12). Visit www.spbgma.com to purchase online and for more information.

Nashville Public Television will host the broadcast premiere of Rounder Records 40th Anniversary Concert on January 14 -- two months before PBS plans to air the concert special national as part of their March fundraising drive.

Krauss’ longtime relationship with the label started back when she signed her very first record deal, inking with Rounder at the ripe age of 14.

“Boy, all I knew (at that point was) my favorite bluegrass records came out on Rounder Records. That and Rebel and Flying Fish,” Krauss says. “But … the first album that I bought for fiddle music was Richard Greene, his album called Duets. And that was a Rounder record. Back then you stared at the album cover constantly, and then you watched the record go around and around and around. So that was their label, in the middle was ‘Rounder.’ And I used to think, ‘Oh if I ever made a record, I’d want it to be on Rounder.’ All my heroes were on that label.”Continue reading →